Abstract :
The renewed interest in context that linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, and others are experiencing, is directly related to a common interest in what one could call the `ecologyʹ of language use. Rather than considering language as a repository of, and a transmission device for, factual information, we ask ourselves how the facts that we are dealing with are placed in, and become meaningful, through their context. In particular, the old adage `Let the facts speak for themselvesʹ has turned out to be pretty meaningless: no fact has ever told anybody anything except by the way it is placed in its context––a placing which is done by the human who `lets the facts speakʹ. One of the more dangerous aspects of this context-excluding fact fetishism is its denial of what I will term (dis)ambiguity, understood as: possible alternative interpretations of `factsʹ. When dealing with ambiguous expressions, the question always has to be asked where these expressions are `at homeʹ, whose viewpoints they represent; in other words, we not only have to contextualize, but in many cases even `re-contextualizeʹ them. A decontextualized, non-ambiguous expression may be used to exclude other. possible interpretations and contexts. In this way, we may effectively marginalize certain users and their legitimate interpretations and contexts, as when a context-less notion of `freedomʹ is employed to exclude those who do not have the means to exercise an alternative conception of `freedomʹ: the poor, the oppressed, the indigenous peoples, and so on. In contrast, by placing the facts in their social (and often ambiguous) contexts, we advocate a truly pragmatic view of context and (dis)ambiguity.
